Breaking up, down and out: Anomie in Georgi Gospodinov's Natural Novel

Abstract

This article argues that Bulgarian writer Georgi Gospodinov's Estestven Roman (Natural Novel, 1999) exposes the simultaneous precariousness of anomie, a condition associated with post-Communism, and the vital significance of its productive activity. Fluid memory fragments augment the interpenetrating hi/stories of narrators, both conflate chronological sequentiality enabling the text to resist and subvert orthodox classifications, be they dialectical, moral, deductive or causal. Through its deployment of dispullulations — multiplicitous, paradoxical complexities of peculiar (inter- and intra-) textual events — Natural Novel, I propose, forges a critical ontology with implications for the individual, Bulgarian culture, and even the contemporary moment globally.